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After finishing his studies at Eton, having no prospect of gaining a university scholarship and his family's means being insufficient to pay his tuition, Eric joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. He resigned and returned to England in 1928 having grown to hate imperialism (as shown by his first novel Burmese Days, published in 1934, and by such essays as 'A Hanging', and ' Shooting an Elephant'). He adopted his pen name in 1933, while writing for the New Adelphi. Perhaps surprisingly for a writer with progressive, socialist views, he chose a pen name that stressed his deep, lifelong affection for the English tradition and countryside: George is the patron saint of England (and George V was monarch at the time), while the River Orwell in Suffolk was one of his most beloved English sites.
Orwell lived for several years in poverty, sometimes homeless, sometimes doing itinerant work, as he recalled in the book Down and Out in Paris and London. He eventually found work as a schoolteacher until ill health forced him to give this up to work part-time as an assistant in a secondhand bookshop in Hampstead, an experience later recounted in the short novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying.
A member of the Independent Labour Party, Orwell felt impelled to fight as an infantryman in the anti-Stalinist POUM (Workers' Party of Marxist Unification) during the Spanish Civil War. In Homage to Catalonia he described his admiration for the apparent absence of a class structure in the revolutionary areas of Spain he visited. He also depicted what he believed was the betrayal of that workers' revolution in Spain by the Spanish Communist Party , which was abetted by the Soviet Union. Orwell was shot in the neck (near Huesca) on May 20, 1937, an experience he described in his short essay "Wounded by a Fascist Sniper", as well as in Homage to Catalonia.
Orwell began supporting himself by writing book reviews for the New English Weekly until 1940. During World War II he was a member of the Home Guard and in 1941 began work for the BBC Eastern Service, mostly working on programmes to gain Indian and East Asian support for Britain's war efforts. He was well aware that he was shaping propaganda, and wrote that he felt like "an orange that's been trodden on by a very dirty boot". Despite the good pay, he quit this job in 1943 to become literary editor of Tribune, a left-wing journal sponsored by a group of Labour Party MPs.
In 1944 Orwell finished his anti- Stalinist allegory Animal Farm, which was published the following year with great critical and popular success. The royalties from Animal Farm provided Orwell with a comfortable income for the first time in his adult life. From 1945 Orwell was the Observer's war correspondent and later contributed regularly to the Manchester Evening News. He was a close friend of the Observer's editor/owner, David Astor and his ideas had a strong influence on Astor's editorial policies. In 1949 his best-known work, the dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four, was published. He wrote the novel during his stay on the island of Jura, off the coast of Scotland.
Between 1936 and 1945 Orwell was married to Eileen O'Shaughnessy, with whom he adopted a son, Richard Horatio Blair (b. May of 1944). She died in 1945 during an operation. In the fall of 1949, shortly before his death, he married Sonia Brownell.
In 1949 Orwell spoke to the Information Research Department, an organization run by the government to encourage the publication of anti-communist propaganda. He offered them information on the "crypto-communist leanings" of some of his fellow writers and advice on how best to spread the anti-communist message. Orwell's motives for this are unclear, though it does not necessarily follow that he had abandoned the democratic socialism that he consistently promoted - merely that he detested Stalinism, as he had already made very clear in his earlier published works. Some have also speculated that the tuberculosis from which he suffered had affected him mentally.
Orwell died at the age of 46 from tuberculosis which he probably had contracted during the period described in Down and Out in Paris and London. He was in and out of hospitals for the last three years of his life. Having requested burial in accordance to the Anglican rite, he was interred in All Saints' Churchyard, Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire with the simple epitaph: Here lies Eric Arthur Blair, born June 25th 1903, died January 21st 1950.
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